Learning to fly : a writer's memoir / Mary Lee Settle ; edited by Anne Hobson Freeman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Settle, Mary Lee

Contributor:

Freeman, Anne Hobson, 1934-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Settle, Mary Lee.

Authors, American--20th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

v, 224 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton, [2007]

Summary:

Two years before her death in 2005, Mary Lee Settle sat down "to trace the way that led me into the writer I have been for fifty years." The result is this memoir, which picks up her life story where Addie (1998) left it, with a girl turning twenty, in love with the language of Shakespeare and determined to be an actress. That summer of 1938 her mother sends Mary Lee off to a theater apprenticeship, inadvertently setting her on a road few women of that era would have dared to travel. The road will lead to serious, "uncompromised" writing and over twenty books. The adventures along the way--from the glamour of New York during the World's Fair, through the terrors of London during the Blitz, to the trials and triumphs of the postwar literary world--will delight, inform, and alarm the reader of this thoroughly modern Canterbury Tale.--From publisher description.

Contents:

Prelude to the summer of 1938

From Barter to Manhattan

The last grand summer

Waiting

Toronto

Prewar in the United States, 1941-1942

Thirteen months in the WAAF

London, 1944

Leaving

The turning year

Another country

Mr. Eliot

Coronation

Nine years

Maugham

My Paris.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0393057321

9780393057324

OCLC:

141187987